Burke: Trump’s own words — and staff’s cover-up — enough to impeach

Published 1:30 am Monday, September 30, 2019

By Tom Burke / Herald columnist

I wasn’t going to write about Trump this week. I wanted to write about Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood or Everett Civic Music, the best entertainment value in the Western Hemisphere.

Timberline is a mecca for summer skiers, hikers doing the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail, mountain bikers, and us folks who enjoy iconic inns and great food. It’s where they all come together at a still-vital monument built by Oregon craftsmen, working for Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Project Administration in the late 1930s.

Everett Civic Music, a 79-year-old, hugely successful concert sponsor, brings incredible talent to our area and offers it at almost silly-low prices. The musical diversity is outstanding and the nationally recognized professionals clearly enjoy performing for a hugely enthusiastic audience. Get some tickets.

But I can’t write about this fun stuff because Donald Trump has forced the start of an impeachment investigation; and concern about our democracy, and the sheer mendacity of our president, takes precedence. Lord, how that man is upsetting our lives, our liberty and our sacred honor.

Trump has us confronting three issues: abuse of power, obstruction and threats against Americans. So …

• Should Trump be impeached because, according to an intelligence services whistleblower, “the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” and “This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the president’s main domestic political rivals.”

• Did his White House cover up what Donald Trump said and did?

• Did Trump threaten whistleblowers and potential witnesses (with death?) for treason or being a “spy.”

Now let’s be clear: This is the beginning of the impeachment investigation and nothing — except whether Trump’s words and actions are sufficient to start the process — counts. Period.

So let’s forgo Trump’s typical in-the-bunker, back-against-the-wall playbook of attacking the whistleblower; discrediting the accusations; and belittling the media as calculated distractions and leave unproved conspiracies about the Bidens or BS about the Democrats in the trash, where they belong.

None of it has any relevance about whether to pursue an investigation.

What has relevance is what the President said and what his people did.

And we have Trump’s own words and a credible document (according to both Trump-appointed Michael Atkinson, inspector general of the intelligence community and Joseph Maguire, acting director of National Intelligence) to help us decide if impeachment charges should be filed.

First, there’s Trump’s White House “transcript” of his conversation with Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, as Trump holds millions of our tax dollars hostage unless Zelensky investigates a Trump political rival.

Trump said, “There is a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that. … So whatever you can do with the attorney general and Rudolph W. Giuliani would be great. … I would like to have the attorney general call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of that. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it, if that’s possible.”

It’s damning proof of Trump’s abuse of power for personal political gain.

Next is the whistleblower’s complaint alleging a cover-up.

“The White House officials who told me this information were deeply disturbed by what had transpired in the phone call. They told me that there was already a “discussion ongoing” with White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood, in the officials’ retelling, that they had witnessed the president abuse his office for personal gain.”

“In the days following the phone call, I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call. … This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call … and were ‘directed’ by White House lawyers to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored for coordination, finalization, and distribution to Cabinet-level officials.”

Which is sufficient-plus for an investigation (according to the inspector general and national intelligence director).

Finally, we have Trump’s own threatening words of thuggish witness intimidation,

“I want to know who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information because that’s close to a spy,” Mr. Trump said. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right? We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

Death? For following the whistleblower law? Wow!

For now, let’s all pay close attention to the facts; filter out the distractions and smokescreens; and watch this constitutionally validated investigation play out as we discover if our president is a liar, a thief, a thug, and a petty little man who would break any law for his petty little self-interest.

Tom Burke’s email address is t.burke.column@gmail.com.